Robert Browning's "Love Among The Ruins" was published in 1855 in London by Chapman & Hall, as part of his collection of poems, Men and Women (Hastings). The critics weren't kind to the book when it was first published (Ryals). The poem consists of seven stanzas, and each stanza contains six rhyming couplets. The couplets are made up of one trochaic line eleven syllables long, and one trochaic line of three syllables. The first stanza begins with the speaker gazing out across a wide stretch of pasture, when his mind imagines the ruins of a lost city nestled beneath the fields:
"Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,Miles and milesHalf-asleepTinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stopAs they crop-Was the site once of a city great and gay,(So they say)Of our country's very capital, its princeAges Since"(Browning, 1-10)
The short lines function as an echo to the longer lines. This mirrors the echoing of images of the ruins in the speaker's mind, juxtaposed to the pastoral landscape: "Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreadsAnd embedsEvery vestige of the city, guessed alone,Stock or stone"
Browning's central theme is that love prevails over all, as it has proven to outlive even this city once "great and gay" (Browning, 7). The pastoral mode of poetry traditionally deals with the idealistic views of Shepherds, who put their conceptions of love on a pedestal. Browning uses the pastoral to emphasize the endurance of nature and passion; for all the work that was put into this grand palace, all that remains is a turret which has sunk into the grass. The poem depicts the speaker's lover waiting within this turret for his passionate embrace. In placing the girl within the ruins, Browning uses contrasting imagery to highlight the vitality of the girl against the barrenness of a once magnificent structure. "Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!Earth's returnsFor whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!Shut them in,With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!Love is best."(Browning, 79-84) Throughout the poem, the speaker poses contrasting themes and images: nature vs city, past vs present, love vs war. In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong sees “Love Among The Ruins” as “point[ing] to the myth of myth itself to the sustaining fictions of mutual passion and a corresponding belief in the unified consciousness prior to the cultural fragmentation which destroys myth and symbol” (285). The skeptical subtext that runs through the poem is typical of what Armstrong calls the “double poem”(13). The double poem can be read objectively and subjectively, and in doing so “it draws attention to the act of representation, the act of relationship and the mediations of language, different in a psychological and in a phenomenological world” (Armstrong 12-13).
Works cited
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Ebook.
Browning, Robert. "Love Among The Ruins." The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Ed.Thomas J. Collins, Vivienne J. Rundle. Peterborough:
Broadview, 2005. 318-319. Print.
Hastings, A. Waller. "Robert Browning." British Children's Writers, 1800-1880. Ed. Meena Khorana. Detroit:Gale Research, 1996. 30-36. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol.
163. Dictionary of Literary Biography Main Series. Web. 5 Feb. 2015.
"Overview: 'Love Among the Ruins'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 41. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Jan. 2016
Ryals, Clyde de L.. “Browning, Robert (1812–1889).” Clyde de L. Ryals.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian
Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. May 2006. 5 Feb. 2015
The poem consists of seven stanzas, and each stanza contains six rhyming couplets. The couplets are made up of one trochaic line eleven syllables long, and one trochaic line of three syllables.
The first stanza begins with the speaker gazing out across a wide stretch of pasture, when his mind imagines the ruins of a lost city nestled beneath the fields:
"Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,Miles and milesHalf-asleepTinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stopAs they crop-Was the site once of a city great and gay,(So they say)Of our country's very capital, its princeAges Since"(Browning, 1-10)
The short lines function as an echo to the longer lines. This mirrors the echoing of images of the ruins in the speaker's mind, juxtaposed to the pastoral landscape:
"Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreadsAnd embedsEvery vestige of the city, guessed alone,Stock or stone"
Browning's central theme is that love prevails over all, as it has proven to outlive even this city once "great and gay" (Browning, 7). The pastoral mode of poetry traditionally deals with the idealistic views of Shepherds, who put their conceptions of love on a pedestal. Browning uses the pastoral to emphasize the endurance of nature and passion; for all the work that was put into this grand palace, all that remains is a turret which has sunk into the grass. The poem depicts the speaker's lover waiting within this turret for his passionate embrace. In placing the girl within the ruins, Browning uses contrasting imagery to highlight the vitality of the girl against the barrenness of a once magnificent structure.
"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!Earth's returnsFor whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!Shut them in,With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!Love is best."(Browning, 79-84)
Throughout the poem, the speaker poses contrasting themes and images: nature vs city, past vs present, love vs war. In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong sees “Love Among The Ruins” as “point[ing] to the myth of myth itself to the sustaining fictions of mutual passion and a corresponding belief in the unified consciousness prior to the cultural fragmentation which destroys myth and symbol” (285). The skeptical subtext that runs through the poem is typical of what Armstrong calls the “double poem”(13). The double poem can be read objectively and subjectively, and in doing so “it draws attention to the act of representation, the act of relationship and the mediations of language, different in a psychological and in a phenomenological world” (Armstrong 12-13).
Works cited
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Ebook.
Browning, Robert. "Love Among The Ruins." The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory. Ed.Thomas J. Collins, Vivienne J. Rundle. Peterborough:
Broadview, 2005. 318-319. Print.
Hastings, A. Waller. "Robert Browning." British Children's Writers, 1800-1880. Ed. Meena Khorana. Detroit:Gale Research, 1996. 30-36. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol.
163. Dictionary of Literary Biography Main Series. Web. 5 Feb. 2015.
"Overview: 'Love Among the Ruins'." Poetry for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 41. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Jan. 2016
Ryals, Clyde de L.. “Browning, Robert (1812–1889).” Clyde de L. Ryals.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian
Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. May 2006. 5 Feb. 2015